The Telegraph says in the report that Corbyn is under fire because he was doing the Salute of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group linked to terrorism in Egypt and the Middle East.The news article is currently viral on main news websites and newspapers that can’t stomach the Labour leader like The Sun and The Metro.That photo is making rounds on alt-rights and Islamophobia fanatics on social media.

Now there is a little misinformation here that needs to be corrected.

Jeremy Corbyn was doing Rabaa the sign which is not an MB salute.The four-finger sign of Rabaa was made in 2014 by a Turkish graphic designer to commemorate the victims of Pro-Islamist president Mohamed Morsi’s sit-in’s forcible dispersal in Rabaa and Nahda squares in Egypt on 13 August 2013.

According to the different human rights organizations, whether Egyptian or international, at least 600 human beings were killed on that day.The numbers of the victims are still disputed but at least 600 victims have been officially confirmed by the semi-official National Council For Human Rights.The Rabaa sign is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood because its members began to do it in their trials, rallies and protests in Egypt and around the world to commemorate the victims. The group indeed adopted it but it is not their salute

That sign is banned in Egypt and some have paid a heavy price because of doing it publicly even accidentally.I would have ignored this matter but unfortunately, it came at the same time as the anniversary of that sad event that we have been suffering from its consequences up until now. I do not need to post a disclaimar that I am not a Muslim Brotherhood supporter or member.

Five months after Ron Lauder, the head of the World Jewish Congress, was granted a platform on the New York Times op-ed page to warn that Israel’s leadership was isolating the country through its unending settlement project and growing intolerance, America’s leading newspaper gave him the page again yesterday, this time to decry Israel’s new nation state bill and its indifference to the opinion of liberal American Jewry. “Israel, This Is Not Who We Are… we cannot allow the politics of a radical minority to alienate millions of Jews worldwide.”

Here are some interpretations of Lauder’s second coming.

—The New York Times as a mouthpiece for the American Jewish establishment has decided to take on Benjamin Netanyahu hammer-and-tongs as a threat to Israel’s future– and implicitly, as a pox on the Jewish image globally.

–Does Netanyahu care? Probably not. He needs to appeal to his rightwing base to win reelection and escape corruption charges. He’s just another tinhorn martinet indifferent to world opinion.

–The piece is significant as another marker of divorce between American Jews and Israel. Jewish Insider stresses how intentional it was of the Times to run the articles, and quotes the passages in which the old conservative Likudnik who helped make Netanyahu warns him that American Jews are not on board: “[A]s a loving brother, I ask Israel’s government to listen to the voices of protest and outrage being heard in Israel and throughout the Jewish world. As president of the World Jewish Congress, I call upon Israeli leaders to rethink their destructive actions during this summer of disharmony. This is not who we are, and this is not who we wish to be.”

–The article contains one very important concession: Israel discriminates against LGBT community. This is the exact opposite of Israel’s claims!

When the war against Syria began in 2011, the Zionist enemy was still occupying the Golan Heights and the Turkish enemy was still occupying the Sanjak of Alexandretta.

Over the years, the Syrian Arab Army has managed to dismantle the conspiracies led by the United States and other colonial powers, in which the Zionist enemy and the Turkish enemy participated. According to the new balance of powers in the region, when the war in Syria comes to an end, the Zionist enemy will be forced to withdraw fully from the Golan without alleged peace deals that follow the Camp David, Oslo and Arabah models. The withdrawal will be without conditions and similar to the Zionist withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. The Zionist enemy has a crippling fear about entering into a direct war with the Syrian Arab Army, whose military and fighting capabilities have developed greatly and has stunned the Zionist enemy. The enemy has tried and failed more than once to test the Syrian air defenses. Syria is fully prepared to enter into a war and liberate the occupied Arab territory in the Golan.

Of course, the same new equations apply to the Turkish enemy, which will be forced to withdraw from Syrian territory which it occupies, because the Syrian Arab Army and its allies will not accept anything but the full liberation of Syrian Arab territory, which has been occupied by aggressor nations which are either directly engaged in this war or which have been occupied by terrorist takfiri groups who work as proxies for them. After that, Turkey will have to withdraw from the Sanjak of Alexandretta which has been historically occupied and which the Syrian state will not allow to remain occupied. The Syrian Arab Army is ready to enter into a war to liberate it — with God as our witness.

When the war against Syria began in 2011, the Zionist enemy was still occupying the Golan Heights and the Turkish enemy was still occupying the Sanjak of Alexandretta.

Over the years, the Syrian Arab Army has managed to dismantle the conspiracies led by the United States and other colonial powers, in which the Zionist enemy and the Turkish enemy participated. According to the new balance of powers in the region, when the war in Syria comes to an end, the Zionist enemy will be forced to withdraw fully from the Golan without alleged peace deals that follow the Camp David, Oslo and Arabah models. The withdrawal will be without conditions and similar to the Zionist withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. The Zionist enemy has a crippling fear about entering into a direct war with the Syrian Arab Army, whose military and fighting capabilities have developed greatly and has stunned the Zionist enemy. The enemy has tried and failed more than once to test the Syrian air defenses. Syria is fully prepared to enter into a war and liberate the occupied Arab territory in the Golan.

Of course, the same new equations apply to the Turkish enemy, which will be forced to withdraw from Syrian territory which it occupies, because the Syrian Arab Army and its allies will not accept anything but the full liberation of Syrian Arab territory, which has been occupied by aggressor nations which are either directly engaged in this war or which have been occupied by terrorist takfiri groups who work as proxies for them. After that, Turkey will have to withdraw from the Sanjak of Alexandretta which has been historically occupied and which the Syrian state will not allow to remain occupied. The Syrian Arab Army is ready to enter into a war to liberate it — with God as our witness.

The two sides clashing in the Gaza Strip, Israel and Hamas, seemed to be closer on Tuesday evening than anytime during the past few months to “the small arrangement” – a full cease-fire that includes a halt to all acts of violence, alongside the first easing of the blockade on Gaza.To really understand Israel and the Palestinians - subscribe to HaaretzIf the efforts to broker the deal by the United Nations and Egyptian intelligence work out, and optimism in Israeli defense circles could be heard for the first time on the matter Tuesday evening, then it is possible that quiet could return to the border between Israel and Gaza for at least a few months.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has examined the possibility of calling early elections over the past few days, because of the coalition crisis over the law on drafting the ultra-Orthodox, along with other considerations. A stable cease-fire in Gaza would allow Netanyahu to conduct the election campaign from a position of relative stability, without having to continually fight back against the accusations that he has abandoned the residents of the south to rockets and incendiary kites.>> Hamas is exploiting Netanyahu’s unwillingness to go to war | Analysis

Minister of Defense Lieberman, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chief of Staff Eisenkot at the graduation ceremony for officers’ course at Training Base 1.Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of DefenseKeep updated: Sign up to our newsletterEmail* Sign up

The negative side of the understandings with Hamas for Netanyahu is that he is in practice negotiating with Hamas. His denials haven’t convinced anyone. Netanyahu knows exactly to whom the mediators are delivering his answers. It has happened in the past too, under Ehud Olmert’s government after Operation Cast Lead, and on Netanyahu’s watch too, after both Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge. But it seems that this time it is even clearer and more unforgiving.It will also be a victory from Hamas’ point of view. The organization began escalating the tensions along the border with mass protests on March 30, from a position of deep distress. The understandings are expected to ease the Israeli pressure on the Gaza Strip and give Hamas breathing room. At the same time, the understandings promise Hamas another achievement: being identified as an important and legitimate partner for regional agreements. And Hamas achieved all this through military resistance, in complete opposition to the line taken by its rival Palestinian camp, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

The step that is now coming together was woven by the United Nations special envoy for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay Mladenov, with the active help of Egyptian intelligence. The latest round of violence, which came last week, sped up the renewal of contacts and may have even advanced the willingness of the two sides to reach an agreement.It seems that Netanyahu has chosen the least bad option. It is very possible he will spare the lives of dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians, who could very well have died in a wide-scale military conflict in Gaza in the next few months. Because Netanyahu never set a clear and attainable goal for himself for an attack on Gaza, he is willing to endure criticism from both the left and right on his demonstration of weakness in the face of terrorism, and not find himself in the middle of a war whose end, the how and why of it, would be a riddle to him.

“A person who was shot in the leg and had his leg amputated weeps. Not because his leg is gone, but because the soldier didn’t kill him.”How many of the young people protesting Friday at the Gaza border fence hoped the soldiers facing them would pull the trigger and end their lives?Many. Many more than is reported or than the Palestinians are prepared to or can admit publicly. To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz“A person who was shot in the leg and had his leg amputated weeps. Not because his leg is gone, but because the soldier didn’t kill him,” said someone who came out of the Gaza Strip for a few days. He told of a 30-year-old man who went up to the fence a few times, was wounded a few times, until he got lucky and the soldier on the other side finally killed him. We’ll get to the women too, soon enough, but we’re treading carefully.Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletterEmail* Sign up

What is the ratio between the number of those seeking to continue protecting the principles of the Palestinian struggle – by protesting at the border fence – and the number of those using the patriotic-nationalistic mantle to commit suicide, knowing that Islam prohibits “ordinary” suicide?>> Hamas is exploiting Netanyahu’s unwillingness to go to war | AnalysisWe don’t know. Israel doesn’t allow us to enter the Gaza Strip to ask these questions and seek answers. Phone calls are not enough, and so we depend on reports from people coming out – Palestinians and foreign journalists.>> No Fuel, No Gas: Israel Clamps Down on Gaza Over Airborne FirebombsPerhaps the protesters are motivated simultaneously by the two goals, and their distance from the fence shows the ratio between their desire to die and their fight for freedom? But many people who are very far from the fence come to see what’s going on, one foreign reporter said. That’s not a struggle, it’s a kind of pastime, because there’s nothing else to do and the sea is full of floating excrement. This journalist, who has known the Gaza Strip for more than 20 years, concludes: When everyone has to find ways to survive, there’s no room for thinking about the national struggle. Many of them are young people who go to the fence to be wounded, thinking that Hamas will pay them, and then they can pay their debts at the grocery store or pay their rent for two months. It’s true: Hamas pays the injured a one-time payment of $200, I’m told. But only if the injury was serious.

Someone who was slightly injured and went to a Hamas office to ask for money was turned away. Someone else was fortunate – his injury was worth compensation, then he went to the fence to be wounded again, and received compensation again. But the wounded quickly discover what they did not take into consideration at first: Injuries have their own costs (beyond pain and disability). Surgery is covered. But medications are lacking, so their family goes deeper into debt to pay for them, or not. And then the flesh is infested with worms and it rots. And that’s not a metaphor.Some people deluded themselves that their family would receive large compensation if they were killed, or that payment for injury would come on a monthly basis. They still think it’s like the second intifada, when Saddam Hussein and Iran sent money for these purposes and the Palestinian Authority bore the burden. Those days are gone forever. On Ramadan the young people went on the marches because a nourishing meal to break the fast was waiting for them, provided by Hamas. On other days they would receive a sandwich and a drink at the protest tents. Yet they are at risk even if they are not standing next to the fence, but rather are some distance away, near the tents, as attested to by a journalist who was standing near the tents last week when a bullet fired by one of our heroic soldiers flew right past his ear.Over the weekend, written proof emerged of the mixture of a death wish and commitment to the struggle. Abdallah al-Qatati, 20, was a volunteer paramedic who went every Friday to rescue unarmed people wounded by the strongest army in the region. Ten days ago he wrote a Facebook post, and people who shared it said it was his last: “As on every Friday, I go to the border, but this Friday is different. I’m going like any young revolutionary protecting his homeland and his land. We don’t care about the goals of the march or the goals of any organization in this march. What is important to us is our land and our dignity. And in short, we are fleeing unto death. In the hope that the second death will be more merciful than the first. And that’s the end of the story.” In other words, life in Gaza is also death, of a different kind. On Friday, an Israeli soldier shot the medic al-Qatati and killed him.And now to the women protesters: Since they are few, this could seem like an accusation, or scorn, which will draw protests. But a Palestinian woman who spoke with women who go to the fence says she believes that few of them do it for national reasons, or that gradually the national reasons gave way to personal-economic reasons. Some of them went to be wounded and receive compensation. One went to be close to her son who was protesting. And many went to die – one whose husband refused to give her a divorce, another who was unmarried and felt that society considered her damaged goods, a third who was a victim of family violence and a fourth who couldn’t stand the poverty, the constant chasing after a shekel for milk and drops of water from the faucet. We are familiar with the phenomenon of women in the West Bank who committed suicide-by-soldier. Poverty in Gaza has reached unimaginable, indescribable levels, even for people who are allowed to go in and see it. The despair growing there behind the iron wall that Israel has built is still seeking the lexicon with which it can be depicted.

Demonstrate with the Arabs - Haaretz Editorial -The place of Livni and the other opposition leaders is in Rabin Square, alongside the Arab community. Their struggle is the struggle of all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike

The demonstration called for Saturday night in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, which represents Israel’s Arab community, is the most important of all the protests that have taken place against the nation-state law. It’s also one of the most important demonstrations in Israel in the past several years.No minority in Israel suffers as much discrimination as the Arab minority, which is also Israel’s largest minority. It is frequently the target of normalized, institutionalized racism. To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to HaaretzThe nation-state law, which has sparked civic protests throughout Israeli society, was engineered precisely in order to strip the Arabs of their rights and subordinate them to rule by the Jews, the lords of the land, even at the price of sacrificing civic equality. This worldview has characterized despicable racist regimes throughout history, and its implementation in Israel is a black stain not only on the history of the state, but also on that of the Jewish people.The nation-state law is an especially ugly milestone in the right’s delegitimization campaign against the Arabs. It’s meant to mark them as enemies, as a fifth column; to cause strife between them and Jews; and to remove them from civil society. Given this, it’s regrettable that the leaders of the opposition, who warmly embraced the Druze community’s justified protest against the law, have decided not to attend this demonstration.Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletterEmail* Sign up

>> In Show of Renewed Activism, Arab Israelis to Protest Nation-state Law on SaturdayOpposition leader Tzipi Livni, who came to the Druze demonstration last Saturday night, announced that she won’t attend the upcoming one because some Knesset members from the predominantly Arab Joint List “don’t share my view that Israel is the nation-state of the Jews.” In the same breath, she declared her belief in “equal rights for all.” She thereby proved that even the left has adopted the right’s propaganda. If, as she says, Livni believes in equality for all and opposes the nation-state law — the issues of the demonstration — why is it even relevant what Joint List MKs think Israel’s character should be?Livni must meet the challenge that was posed to Israeli society by President Reuven Rivlin in his “four tribes” speech, in which he argued that Israel’s future depends on abandoning a worldview based on majority and minority in favor of one that is based on a partnership with the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs, who don’t define themselves as Zionist. The place of Livni and the other opposition leaders Saturday night is in Rabin Square, alongside the Arab community. Their struggle is the struggle of all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike.

Peter Hallward is a political philosopher best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities.

Jeremy Corbyn is being urged on all sides to adopt the ‘internationally accepted’ definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Just accept the definition in full, he’s told, and the whole ugly row about Labour being a ‘class enemy’ of the Jewish people will go away. What could be simpler?

So what does this IHRA definition involve? Would its adoption actually help make it easier to identify and condemn expressions of antisemitism? Or are key parts of it worded in such a way as to invite further confusion, and to make it harder to criticise some ongoing and far-reaching injustices?

....Perhaps the most important and most debatable assertion of the document, however, is the claim that ‘manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.’ This is the point worth pondering.

It’s not entirely clear what ‘targeting’ involves, as the term is again vague enough to evoke anything from hostile criticism to mere designation or reference. Targeting can’t simply be reducible to criticism, though, since the document adds an immediate caveat to that effect: ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’ That means, I assume, that it wouldn’t be antisemitic to grumble about the fact that in Israel, as in some other places, taxes might be too high, or the delivery of public services too poor. It would only be antisemitic to target, criticise or refer to Israel as a state acting specifically like a Jewish collectivity.

Now it’s no secret that the Israeli state regularly pursues policies that favour Jewish over non-Jewish members of the population it controls. Jewish people, for instance, enjoy a ‘right of return’ that is denied to Palestinian refugees whose homes were destroyed when Israel was created. Israel’s long-running colonisation of West Bank lands would also be quite hard to describe, let alone criticise, without making some reference to the way its settlements distinguish between Jewish and Arab collectivities.

This puts would-be critics of Israeli colonialism in a bit of a bind. Presumably it’s ok to object to colonial projects in general, projects of the sort that might be undertaken by ‘any other country’. But it isn’t easy to criticise settlement programmes specifically designed to replace Palestinian inhabitants with Jewish ones without referring to the state promoting them as a ‘Jewish collectivity’. Is criticism of Israeli settlements thus antisemitic by definition? If not why not, according to the IHRA’s formulation?

An app operated as part of an Israeli government propaganda campaign issued a “mission” for social media users to make comments against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, accusing him of anti-Semitism.

This is the latest evidence of an Israeli campaign of psychological warfare against the UK’s main opposition party.

The Act.IL app on Sunday falsely accused Corbyn of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany in a 2010 meeting which had been resurfaced by The Times last week.

The “mission” was documented in this Tweet by Michael Bueckert, a Canadian researcher who has been monitoring the app since last year.

The reality is very different from the app’s claims.

As my colleague Adri Nieuwhof explains, Corbyn hosted a meeting titled “Never Again – For Anyone” with Hajo Meyer, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and an anti-Zionist who spoke out strongly for Palestinian rights.

Meyer passed away in 2014.

The Act.IL app asks users to comment on Facebook in response to a Huffington Post UK story about Corbyn’s alleged “anti-Israel remarks,” which it claims are “often a way to hide anti-Semitism.”

The “mission” directs users to click “like” on a comment by Facebook user “Nancy Saada,” and write their own comments echoing her criticisms of Labour.

“Nancy” has posted elsewhere on her Facebook profile a photo of herself in an Israeli army uniform posing on an armored vehicle draped with an Israeli flag.

Last December, Andrew Kadi flew to Israel to visit his mother. As he walked through Ben Gurion International Airport, officials pulled him aside and said that the security services wanted to speak with him.Kadi is among the leaders of a major pro-Palestinian advocacy group, and border authorities always question him when he travels to Israel to see his family. This time, however, something was different.

During his second of what ended up being three interrogations, spanning more than eight hours, Kadi realized that much of what the interrogator knew about him had come from Canary Mission, an anonymously-run online blacklist that tries to frighten pro-Palestinian students and activists into silence by posting dossiers on their politics and personal lives.

Kadi’s interrogator asked question after question about organizations listed on his Canary Mission profile. A pro-Palestinian organization that Kadi had been involved with but that wasn’t listed on his Canary Mission profile went unmentioned. Hours later, a third interrogator confirmed what Kadi had suspected: They were looking at his Canary Mission profile.

Canary Mission has said since it went live in 2015 that it seeks to keep pro-Palestinian student activists from getting work after college. Yet in recent months, the threat it poses to college students and other activists has grown far more severe.The site, which is applauded by some pro-Israel advocates for harassing hardcore activists, is now being used as an intelligence source on thousands of students and academics by Israeli officials with immense power over people’s lives, the Forward has learned.Rumors of the border control officers’ use of the dossiers is keeping both Jewish and Palestinian activists from visiting relatives in Israel and the West Bank, and pro-Palestinian students say they are hesitant to express their views for fear of being unable to travel to see family.>> Twitter account of Canary Mission, group blacklisting pro-Palestinian activists, deactivatedMeanwhile, back on campus, pro-Israel students are facing suspicion of colluding with Canary Mission. The students, and not the operatives and donors who run it from behind a veil of anonymity, are taking the blame for the site’s work.

The dossiersCanary Mission’s profiles, of which there are now more than 2,000, can run for thousands of words. They consist of information about the activist, including photographs and screenshots, cobbled together from the internet and social media, along with descriptions of the groups with which they are affiliated.The phrase, “if you’re a racist, the world should know,” appears on the top of each page on the site.In addition to the thousands of profiles of pro-Palestinian students and professors, Canary Mission has also added a smattering of profiles of prominent white supremacists, including 13 members of Identity Evropa and a handful of others.The site’s profiles appear to be based entirely on open source intelligence that could be gathered by anyone with a computer. But the researchers are thorough, and some of what they post is exceptionally personal. Canary Mission’s profile of Esther Tszayg, a junior at Stanford University whose profile went online in May, includes two photographs of her as a young child and one taken for a campus fashion magazine.“It feels pretty awful and I really wish I wasn’t on that website,” said Tszayg, the president of Stanford’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian group.Canary Mission’s profile of Rose Asaf, a leader of the local chapter of JVP at New York University, includes nearly 60 photographs of her and screenshots of her social media activities. It went online in November of 2017, when she was a college junior.Liz Jackson, a staff attorney at the legal advocacy group Palestine Legal, said that she was aware of one case in which Canary Mission posted old photographs a student had deleted a year before. The student believes that Canary Mission had been tracking her for over a year before they posted her profile.Some of what Canary Mission captures is genuinely troubling, including anti-Semitic social media posts by college students. But often, the eye-catching charges they make against their subjects don’t quite add up. A profile of an NYU freshman named Ari Kaplan charges him with “demonizing Israel at a Jewish event.” In fact, he had stood up at a Hillel dinner to make an announcement that was critical of President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.“It’s really weird when they’re trying to have someone who looks like me [as] the face of anti-Semitism,” said Kaplan, joking that he looks stereotypically Jewish.The borderIt’s these profiles that Israeli border control officers were looking at when they interrogated Kadi, who is in his 30s, and is a member of the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Kadi is a U.S. citizen, but his mother and her family are Palestinian citizens of Israel.Kadi’s case is not unique. In April, before deporting Columbia University Law School professor Katherine Franke and telling her she will be permanently banned from the country, an Israeli border control officer showed her something on his phone that she says she is “80% sure” was her Canary Mission profile.The officer, Franke said, had accused her of traveling to Israel to “promote BDS.” When she said that wasn’t true, the officer accused her of lying, saying she was a “leader” of JVP. He held up the screen of his phone, which appeared to show her Canary Mission profile, and told her: “See, I know you’re lying.”Franke, who had previously sat on JVP’s academic advisory council steering committee but at that time had no formal role with the group, told the officer she was not on JVP’s staff. The officer deported her anyhow.“Canary Mission information is often neither reliable, nor complete, nor up to date,” said Israeli human rights attorney Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, who represents activists and human rights advocates denied entry to Israel. Schaeffer Omer-Man says that the site, as such, shouldn’t legally qualify to be used as the basis for a deportation decision by border control officers, as it doesn’t meet reliability standards set by Israeli administrative law.Yet incidents like those experienced by Franke and Kadi are on the rise. Schaeffer Omer-Man said that clients for years have said that they suspected that their interrogators had seen their Canary Mission profiles, based on the questions they asked. More recently, she said, clients have told her that border control mentioned Canary Mission by name.Rumors of these incidents are spreading fear among campus activists.“I have family in Israel, and I don’t expect I will be let in again,” said Tszayg, the Stanford student.Palestine Legal’s Liz Jackson said that a large majority of people who get in touch with her organization about their Canary Mission profile are mostly worried about traveling across Israeli borders. “That really puts the muzzle on what people can say in the public sphere about Palestine,” Jackson said.Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the country’s border control agency, did not respond to a question about whether it is ministry policy for its interrogators to use Canary Mission as a source of information on travelers. It’s possible that the officers are finding the Canary Mission dossiers on their own, by searching for travelers’ names on Google.But absent a denial from the interior ministry, it’s also possible that the dossiers are being distributed systematically. When Schaeffer Omer-Man reviews her clients’ interrogation files, as attorneys have the right to do under Israeli law, she has never seen a mention of Canary Mission. What she has seen, however, in summaries of the interrogations, are references to material provided by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the arm of the Israeli government tasked with opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement worldwide, largely through a secret network of non-governmental organizations that help it defend Israel abroad.The Israeli connectionWhen Gilad Erdan, the strategic affairs minister, took over his agency in 2015, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, as it is officially known in English, had a tiny staff and a small budget. In just a few years, he has turned it into a major operation with a budget of over $100 million over two years, according to reporting by the Israeli investigative magazine the Seventh Eye.At the core of the MSA’s operation is a network of more than a hundred non-governmental organizations with which it shares information and resources. “A key part of the strategy is the belief that messaging by ‘real people’ is much more effective than plain old hasbara [propaganda] by official spokespersons,” said Itamar Benzaquen, an investigative journalist at the Seventh Eye, who has done extensive reporting on the MSA.The Forward has learned that the people who run Canary Mission are in direct contact with the leadership of Act.il, a pro-Israel propaganda app that is a part of the network, and has benefited from a publicity campaign funded by the MSA, according to Benzaquen’s reporting.The founder and CEO of Act.il, Yarden Ben Yosef, told the Forward last fall that he had been in touch with the people who run Canary Mission, and that they had visited his office in Israel.Neither Canary Mission nor the MSA responded to queries about their relationship to each other.The operatorsCanary Mission has jealously guarded the anonymity of its operators, funders, and administrators, and its cloak of secrecy has held up against the efforts of journalists and pro-Palestine activists alike.Two people, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations, have separately told the Forward that a British-born Jerusalem resident named Jonathan Bash identified himself to them as being in charge of Canary Mission.The Forward reported in 2015 that Bash was the CEO of a pro-Israel advocacy training organization, Video Activism, that appeared to have numerous ties to Canary Mission. At the time, Bash denied there was any relationship between the organizations.Neither Canary Mission nor Bash responded to requests for comment.The responseAs Canary Mission has become an increasingly prominent feature of the campus landscape, students have adapted to its threat. Increasingly, student governments vote on divestment resolutions by secret ballot, partly in an attempt to keep Canary Mission from profiling student representatives who vote in favor.Student activist groups, meanwhile, strategically mask the identities of vulnerable members. Abby Brook, who has been a leader in both the Students for Justice in Palestine and JVP groups at George Washington University, said that her fellow activists had strategized about who would be a public-facing leader of the group, and shoulder the risk of appearing on Canary Mission. When her profile went up last year, she was ready.“We made strategic decisions within our organization about who would be out-facing members and who would be in-facing members, knowing that Canary Missionwould have different consequences for different people,” Brook said. She said that the names of members of her chapter of SJP who are Palestinian are not listed publicly, and that those individuals have stayed off of Canary Mission.“We deliberately keep those people private,” Brook said. “I’m not Palestinian; I won’t be prohibited from being able to go home if I’m listed on Canary Mission. It has a lot less consequences for me as a white person.”While Brook’s Palestinian colleagues have been able to hide their identities while being active on the issue, others have chosen not to take the risk. Palestine Legal’s Jackson said that she has fielded questions from students who want to take political action in support of Palestinian rights, but have been afraid to do so because of what being listed on Canary Mission could mean for their families. One student activist told Jackson she wanted to be a leader in SJP, but asked Jackson if getting a Canary Mission profile could damage her family’s naturalization application.“I said I don’t know, honestly,” Jackson said.Another student told Jackson that she had wanted to write an op-ed about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, a controversial piece of federal legislation that critics say could limit free speech, but that she was afraid to be published because she wanted to be able to go visit her grandparents in the West Bank, and couldn’t risk being profiled on Canary Mission.For students who do find themselves on Canary Mission, there is little recourse. Canary Mission has posted a handful of essays by “ex-canaries,” people who have written effusive apologies in return for being removed from the site. Jackson said that some profiles have been temporarily removed after the subjects filed copyright complaints, but that they were reposted later with the offending images removed.There do not appear to have been any defamation suits filed against Canary Mission. The authors of the profiles are careful about what they write, and pursuing a lawsuit would place a heavy burden on the plaintiff. “Students who are naturally concerned about the reputational damage of being smeared as a terrorist usually don’t want to go through a public trial, because that only makes it worse,” Jackson wrote in an email. “It’s tough to take on a bully, especially in court. But litigation is not off the table.”Campus spiesIn the meantime, Canary Mission’s utter secrecy has created an atmosphere of suspicion on campuses. While the operatives behind Canary Mission hide behind their well-protected anonymity, pro-Israel students take the blame for its activities, whether or not they were involved.A number of students listed on the site who spoke with the Forward named specific pro-Israel students on their campuses who they suspected of having informed on them to Canary Mission.Tilly Shames, who runs the local Hillel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said that Canary Mission has led to suspicion of pro-Israel students on her campus. “It has created greater mistrust and exclusion of pro-Israel students, who are assumed to be involved in Canary Mission, or sharing information with Canary Mission, when they are not,” Shames said.Kaplan, the NYU sophomore, said that he’s now wary talking to people who he knows are involved in pro-Israel activism on campus.“I’ll want to be open and warm with them, but it will be, how do I know this guy isn’t reporting to Canary Mission?” Kaplan said. He said he didn’t intend to let the suspicions fomented by Canary Mission keep him from spending time with other Jewish students.“I’m not going to live in fear; I love Jews,” he said. “I’m not going to not talk to Jewish students out of fear of being on Canary [Mission], but it would be better to have some solidarity from the Jewish community of NYU.”For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at ▻http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

The abominable nation-state law was admittedly passed at this particular moment for contemptible political reasons: Elections are only a Knesset session away, and in the background are the investigations of the prime minister, a despair-inducing front devoid of achievement in the south and a terrifying front in the north.To really understand Israel and the Palestinians - subscribe to HaaretzBut these circumstances, while genuine and rational, don’t hide what comes next. And what comes next is clear. Israel, with the support of a substantial portion of its Jewish population, is en route to apartheid, both de facto and de jure, which will evict the Arabs from civil society. Next in line for the chopping block: leftists, who are going with the flow to various degrees, and ultimately, anyone defined as disloyal to the government (that is, “the state”).Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletterEmail* Sign up

This is not a cataclysmic lamentation or a stylized prophecy of destruction. It’s reality, plain and simple. The moment you begin fiddling with democracy – that is, creating differences in the level of equality to which citizens are entitled and conditioning it on various conditions – the road is clear.The attempts to bribe the Druze, whose pain, unlike that of the other Arabs, evokes empathy from Jewish Israelis, only makes the picture clearer: The government is creating castes among minorities and citizens in general based on the degree of sympathy the government has for them and the whims of the masses.What can one do in light of this reality but rend one’s garments, weep bitter tears and protest at demonstrations whose importance is beyond price, but whose contribution to changing the course of reality will be limited to the point of nonexistence?Israel’s Jewish and democratic camp has only one partner for building a front against the settler right, with its hallmarks of fascism, which is currently making historic changes to the country’s character. That partner is the Arabs.

And when we speak of making such a partnership, we aren’t talking about a Jewish and democratic camp that includes only people like opposition MKs Tamar Zandberg and Tzipi Livni, but also former senior defense officials like Gabi Ashkenazi, Tamir Pardo and Moshe Ya’alon, who still aren’t willing to be portrayed, heaven forbid, as leftists, but whom the modern right is already rejecting like a transplant, because such security establishment figures’ consciences bar them from submerging themselves in today’s right wing and joining in the destruction of democracy.>> Planted by Netanyahu and Co., nation-state law is a time bomb exploding in Israel’s face | Analysis >>Nevertheless, it’s not only the Jews on whom the burden of effecting a change in consciousness falls. The Arabs will also have to make what they see as painful concessions.As long as MKs Ahmad Tibi, Jamal Zahalka and Aida Touma-Sliman keep talking about two states – a state of all its citizens on one side and the nation-state of the Palestinian people on the other – they’ll remain within the bounds of their own narrow community, plus a few thousand Jewish voters following their conscience or a fad. They’ll have no chance of taking power, no ability to have a major impact, no access to the resources that could save the voters from the bitter fate written on the wall.Therefore, they’ll have to swallow hard and accept the Law of Return and the fact that Israel within the 1967 borders is the national home of the Jewish people worldwide, in order to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state and save themselves and us from the nightmare of occupation and apartheid.This won’t be an alliance of love. It won’t even be an encounter between friends. But this is the only way to survive as a citizen of Israel and not become a political prisoner in a Bezalel Smotrich-like theocracy.The battle for life requires passing through the deep wadis of painful compromise and getting scratched by the thorns of upsetting concessions. It requires changing our methods and our worldviews, because there’s no choice. Because we want to live. And just for your information, we are in a fight for our lives.